Payroll Leaders Retreat, Come Back Energized

By Ginny Montgomery

With the changes in staff at the Payroll Office, it was time for a restructure of the management team. So, on May 1, 2002, the members of the Payroll Office Management and Operations Teams took a day to examine their purpose, roles and the progression of the Payroll Dashboard.

With the help of Debby Seaman, as facilitator, Linda Braziel, Ginny Montgomery, Heather Norberg Stewart, Christa Woodhull, Mike Fleming and Charles Bennett met at Heather's home for a busy day of planning.

The team determined early in the day that this group is much more focused than previous management teams. There was consensus that information sharing is important and that unresolved issues need to be dealt with immediately to diffuse any unnecessary conflicts.

Acknowledging that meetings can be a drag sometimes, we decided that our team needs to be a little more exciting. We decided that a breakfast meeting at Café Allegro would be a good idea. It was agreed that by making the meetings a little more enjoyable (food is always a motivator in the Payroll Office) participation and productivity would increase.

The next discussion focused on group membership and roles of the Management and Operations teams. We agreed that the Management Team would be dealing with issues that are "high-level" and conceptual. The Operations Team would then be charged with working on "day-to-day" issues and any assignments handed down from the Management team. The biggest challenge will be to make sure that the Operations team meetings are not a rehash of the Management meetings.

Feeling confident about our progress, we went to lunch at Rosita's Mexican restaurant. After a lovely lunch (there really is a food thing with this group!), we returned to Heather's home feeling full and ready to tackle the Payroll Office dashboard.

There were several questions that we needed to clarify regarding the dashboard. What data needs to be collected (is useful)? What major processes need to be defined? What exactly is the dashboard supposed to accomplish?

After a bit of debate, we came to the conclusion that the dashboard was going to be a tool that Payroll (and others) could use to measure how we were doing, whether we were meeting our goals, where we needed improvement, and a way to show how we were improving. With this defined, we moved on to the next step - defining the major fields for information gathering.

Building on a previous meeting, the major fields were determined to be: Paying People, Managing Money, Financial Reporting (Tax Reports), Customer Service and Employee Development.

Having made significant progress, we decided that everyone would go back to their individual work groups in the office and clarify what measures need to be gathered so that the information would be ready for the dashboard presentation in June. We agreed that the next meeting to discuss the dashboard would be held at Café Allegro and would be a breakfast meeting.

We ended the day by reviewing the Payroll Office strategic plan and discussing a few issues regarding the latest on-line application while eating warm, fresh-from-the-oven, chocolate chip cookies (food, again!).